A Reality Check On Bosnia

September 26, 1998

Years ago, Yugoslavs heralded Sarajevo as a paradigm of peaceful coexistence--a city where Serbs and Croats, Muslims and Jews all lived together, bridging the ethnic and religious divides. Yugoslavia showcased the 1984 Olympics there. Its old Bascarsija district was said to have more churches, mosques and synagogues bunched closely together than any other city but Jerusalem.

All that was swept aside by slaughter, ethnic cleansing and civil war in the early 1990s. Now the West's uphill battle to restore non-violent coexistence may have been dealt its most serious setback yet.

Western officials confirmed Friday that in general elections two week ago Nikola Poplasen, a hardline, Bosnian Serb ultra-nationalist, beat Biljana Plavsic, the incumbent president of the Bosnian Serb Republic who had been embraced by the United States and the West as their moderate hope.

This is a huge boost for those, like the Karadzics and Mladics, who still dream of a "Greater Serbia," and a sad defeat for the western vision of reintegrating Serbs, Muslims and Croats.

With neighboring Kosovo seething and violence breaking out in Albania, the Clinton administration's policy of stabilization, democratization and pacification in the Balkans is imperilled.

The Bosnian election results are a reality check for the West in its long, costly effort to bring peace and ethnic harmony to the shattered region. The ethnic hatreds there go back centuries. Can outsiders ever bring peace--as opposed to an enforced cessation of hostilities--to the area?

Longtime Yugoslavian leader Josip Broz Tito, a Communist who kept a tight lid on divisive nationalist forces, knew the dangers they could unleash. The pot has always boiled beneath the surface. It will take time to reduce it to a simmer.

The question is: How much time do the U.S. and the West have? President Clinton already has extended the U.S. commitment in Bosnia twice and remains vulnerable to criticism that this is an unwise deployment of American military forces. If the election result emboldens the Serbs to aggression toward the American and other NATO troops in their midst, Clinton's commitment might become untenable.

The U.S.-brokered Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995 had two main goals: first, to separate the warring parties and end their belligerence, and second, to knit the country back together somehow. The election results confirm there has been far less progress toward the second goal than had been hoped. Indeed, parts of that second goal--like the arrest and prosecution of war criminals--have purposely gone unenforced in some prominent cases.

The efforts of the U.S. and NATO have not been for naught: Three years after Dayton the basic truce has held, preventing a return to carnage that killed 200,000 people and left up to 1.7 million displaced. To recite some of the names from that time--Srebrenica, "Sniper's Alley," Tuzla--is to recall why America ultimately became so deeply involved.

The question now is whether, in the face of a setback like the recent election results, the commitment to rebuild Bosnia can be--or ought to be--sustained.